Guidelines & Best Practice
The advertising industry is largely self-regulated through codes of conduct.
Below is a selection of resources you may find useful or interesting if you're keen to learn more.

Oct 2014: The IAB Australia Standards and Guidelines Council has reviewed and updated the IAB Australia Digital Workflow Best Practice first published in 2012. In addition to updated workflows for standard and custom campaigns, the council have added a document outlining the process for a programmatic environment.

Advertisers expect that all online content is viewed by human audiences - real consumers who have the potential to buy a product or service. That is not always the case.

This paper was written for advertisers, agencies, and marketers who are familiar with common practices in digital advertising on desktop browsers—specifically cookie tracking and optimisation—but who need a better understanding of how these work on smartphones and tablets.

The Guidelines cover when brand effectiveness research should be conducted and the two recommended methodologies, as well as providing a checklist for the pre-selection, set up and reporting stages of the research.


The Mobile Phone Creative Guidelines, which were developed by the IAB US and the Mobile Marketing Association, seek to create commonality for the development of ad units across the mobile phone ecosystem.

Adopted by the IAB US, this updated mobile rich media ad guidelines (MRAID 2.0) articulate a standard interface specification and definition to address known interoperability issues between publisher mobile applications, different ad servers and different rich media platforms.

These guidelines and accompanying commentary set out recommendations for how organisations should moderate user generated comments that are posted to social media channels. It highlights the tools made available by the social media platform operators, identifies good business practice with respect to moderating user comments and general guidance.

The IAB Video Multiple Ad Playlist (VMAP) specification is an XML template that video content owners can use to describe the structure for ad inventory insertion when they don’t control the video player or the content distribution outlet.

The IAB’s Video Player Ad-Serving Interface Definition (VPAID) establishes a common interface
between video players and ad units, enabling a rich interactive in-stream ad experience.